During this interview from April 2026, Dr. Michelle Conklin-Kusel, a Writing and Rhetoric PhD graduate, discusses her dissertation Viral Lies: Information Disorder and the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States, growing as an educator, navigating personal challenges, and the value of spending time in nature during graduate school.
Can you talk a little bit about your dissertation and what it was?
My dissertation was titled Viral Lies: Information Disorder and the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States. I compared two sets of emails. One was among Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) political appointees and their staff members who were working under the direction of President Donald Trump during his first administration to downplay the dangers of COVID-19 and try to reopen the economy to increase his chances for re-election. I juxtaposed that with emails to and from Dr. Anthony Fauci, who, at the time, was head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is a subdivision of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
There werea lot of differences in terms of weight, because HHS emails were 111 pages and Fauci’s emails were more than 3,200 pages. The HHS emails were focused on creating a narrative that made it so that the lockdown was worse than the virus regarding health effects. They were trying to make the argument that increased unemployment plus people being isolated would lead to what they called deaths of despair, such as overdosing on drugs or alcohol or suicide. They were cherry-picking anything that would support their ability to try to bring the country back to normal before we had a vaccine. The trouble with this is that imperiled people’s lives and well-being because we didn’t know about long COVID at the time.
Fauci and the people he was communicating with were talking about what they needed to do to try to keep people locked down and safe, but they also discussed the steps they needed to take to get vaccine research up and running. There were also people who were communicating with Fauci, people within the medical community as well as everyday people, who were falling for the talking points that HHS was making.
If people don’t have good, reliable, solid information that they can use to make informed decisions about their healthcare and what kind of political leadership they want, that has material effects on people’s lived realities.
I’m happy that my dissertation is finished. I want to turn it into a book that's a little more accessible for the average person. Most people don’t take dissertations to the beach or read them for nighttime reading. I want to contextualize it more and put it into a frame that will be more digestible. I think there’s a lot of valuable lessons we can learn about how and why people create disinformation, why people misrepresent real information, how they take it out of context, and how we can spot that.
That was a really thorough answer, which leads into my next question: what classes or research experiences led you to that topic or approach?
It may sound kind of ordinary, but I was my mother’s legal guardian when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease about a year before the pandemic. She was in a group home, and, during the lockdown, I was isolated from her. I still had to do things to make sure she got the care she needed, and it was really hard for me to explain why I couldn’t see her. I was trying not to scare her but, at the same time, trying to explain I wasn’t ignoring her, I was trying to protect her from this awful illness. Unfortunately, she got COVID two weeks before she was supposed to get her vaccine, and it accelerated her regression. She died much more quickly because of contracting COVID, like a lot of people who had dementia and Alzheimer’s disease did.
Switching gears a little bit, what are some of your proudest accomplishments from your time at George Mason Univeristy?
I had been teaching at the college level for seven years before I got to George Mason as an adjunct, but I’ve grown a lot as an educator. I’ve learned to prioritize some aspects of grading over others, and I’ve learned how to better convey to students why writing is important, especially now that we’ve got AI. Writing teaches you to be a better and more careful thinker, and it teaches you how to be more analytical.
Also, George Mason has incredible support for graduate students. I had guardianship of my mom, who had Alzheimer’s disease, but we were also displaced from our home for 31 months due to an explosion and fire in our home. I had to ask for extensions, access resources, and get grace from my professors and committee members. When people above you model that, it helps you, in turn, do that for your own students. My students were also more willing to use campus resources because they understood the benefit from seeing somebody who had used those kinds of services. I was able to relate more to how one’s material conditions do affect one’s ability to do scholarly work, and I think we need to talk a little bit more about that.
What’s next for you after graduation?
I’m currently looking for a full-time position teaching writing and rhetoric. I’ve been interviewing. I also intend to convey my dissertation into a book, and I’ve got a couple of ideas for journal articles. When one chapter ends, a new one begins, and I think of my time at George Mason as preparing me for my next adventure.
Finally, what’s something fun you did during the PhD program?
I eloped with my husband on the beach in Key West. That was phenomenal! It was the best week of my life.
Also, it was unexpected, but, in order to try to figure out how to hang on to our home while trying to find an affordable place to live, my husband and I lived on a sailboat in the Chesapeake Bay for thirteen months. We were at a marine on Kent Island, which is the largest island in the Chesapeake. Waking up every day in nature and being literally a stone’s throw away from a major hiking trail gave me time to do some deep thinking about the work I wanted to do in my dissertation. It also gave me time to process a lot of things that had happened during my time at GMU that I did not expect and the serenity I needed to finish my degree.
Anybody who feels really stressed out and overwhelmed, I highly recommend going and finding the closest natural spot to you and spending some quality time in it, because it will renew your mind and your body in ways that you don’t expect. The time you spend in nature is not taking away from the work you need to do. Instead, it will actually enhance it.
Update! Dr. Conklin-Kusel began her position as Assistant Professor at the University of the Bahamas in August 2026. Congratulations, Dr. Conklin-Kusel!